Developments in scholarly and electronic publishing, bibliometric experiments and legal issues in information work

Information science can be defined, very broadly, as the study of factors affecting or related to the creation, storage, retrieval, use, dissemination, preservation and destruction of information. This submission is composed of publications covering three broad subject areas within information science, i.e., bibliometrics, scholarly and electronic publishing and legal issues in information work. Bibliometrics is the study of mathematical characteristics of literatures and citations to those literatures; the scholarly and electronic publishing industries are major creators of information and have been subject to major changes in recent years; all information professionals interact with the law as the creation, dissemination and preservation of information are subject to legal constraints of one type or another. Thus, although on the surface these three areas of research interest appear disparate, they do interlink within the umbrella of information science. The papers cover the period 1985 to the end of 2005.